Week 173

Last week Alper visited Moscow to participate in Urban Forum. He tells me he talked about “data and generativity as a practice for innovative cities.” Meanwhile I soldiered on in the Utrecht studio with half a jealous eye on his Instagram feed.

On Monday I acted as sounding board for Zineb and Chris. As mentioned earlier, they are developing a game-like intervention for an area of the Netherlands facing population shrinkage, as part of the Studio for Unsolicited Architecture. We mostly talked about prototyping strategies for collective intelligence games—which is what they’re leaning towards, think World Without Oil. Next for them is testing some initial assignments, I’m curious to see how that’ll turn out.

Work with Herman on HIRAME continued—we filled up a few whiteboards with conceptual models and the like. Next step is a first workshop with the client team, which’ll happen this week.

Simon and Alper worked to get a digital prototype of SAKE out the door—with a bit of help from me. I demo’d the outcome for the De Gids editors on Friday and then set up a fresh game. They’ll play it for the coming weeks, after which we’ll make an inventory of issues and possible improvements and kick of a second iteration. That will most likely happen in the new year.

And finally, I wrote up Ceremony of Surprise for our portfolio, and announced the Christmas drinks we’ll be having at our Utrecht studio this Friday. If you’re reading this, consider yourself invited.